Undead’s Building Review

Is Undead’s Building Worth Your Time?

Kinda.

What Should You Play it On?

The Nintendo Switch.

What Do We Think

Undead’s Building has a lot of potential, but just as I was getting the hang of it the game ends! It’s way too short.

I managed to beat the entire game in around 30 minutes. That’s not much of a feat considering there’s only seven levels. In addition, there’s not even much incentive to go back and 100% the levels as far as I can tell. With that said, I did have fun playing the game so for me, yeah it’s worth the price. Is it a shallow experience? Sure. But it has potential and I’d like to see this concept fleshed out more.

Gameplay

You play as the hero – the elevator operator. It’s up to you to control the elevator and rescue as many survivors as possible from the zombie horde. Move the joystick to choose the floor. Once you collect the survivors you let them out on the escape floors. Press the L or R button to view the survivors through the security camera.

And…that’s it. You have to save more survivors as you progress, but once you get the hang of the mechanics it’s relatively simple. When the level starts you get a view of the security cameras so you can plan which floors to go to first. While it might be tempting to collect survivors and immediately set them free, the best course of action is to keep them in the elevator and collect others until you’re at max capacity. This way you don’t lose any precious time. And while you’re going in between floors, you can quickly check the security camera to plan out your next move.

It’s a simple mechanic, but effective. You get a letter grade depending on how many people you save. And you also get updated stats based on how quickly you move between floors, how accurate you are (stopping at the correct floors) and something called “wildness” which apparently means you don’t even bother saving anyone. What do these stats do? I have no idea.

To be honest, the description makes it sound much more epic than it actually is. It’s a relatively fast-paced game so you don’t get to spend a lot of time considering your choices, you generally just end up moving to the floors that have the greatest amount of survivors. There are no “tough choices” to make as you don’t really have time to weigh the options. There’s no emotional weight if one of the survivors get bit. You just move on to the next floor.

As well, while the zombies do turn the survivors if you leave them in the hallway for too long, the zombies themselves don’t pose any other threat once the people have entered the elevator. It would have been interesting if they reached out to grab someone. Heck, it could just be a visual effect just to add a little extra layer of intensity to the game.

I also noticed once or twice that someone was coughing and thought they were potentially infected. It would have been cool if they turned and started attacking other survivors inside if you kept them in the elevator for too long. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Art

The assets aren’t great, but honestly, that’s okay. I’m not really one who cares about super high-res assets anyway and considering this was only $5.99, I’m not expecting AAA quality. With that said, the developers could have added a bit more variety to the survivor models. Heck, all they needed to do was change the color of the hair, skin color and even clothes color to provide a little more variety so it doesn’t look like you’re saving a bunch of clones (perhaps that’s the cause of the zombie outbreak? Botched cloning?)

Music

Not really much to write home about here. It wasn’t distracting, but it wasn’t memorable either. There were some basic sound effects here that definitely helped, but again nothing that blew me away.

Overall

If you’re just looking for something quick and relatively fun to pick up, play and beat, then Undead’s Building isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. It’s fun enough, but it could have been so much more than it is. And that’s probably what bums me out the most. There’s potential here, but this ultimately feels like a game jam game that the developers decided to release without any further updates. Good concept, execution could have been better. Is it worth the $5.99 price tag…ehhhh…

Jasmine Greene has been a freelance writer for over four years with experience in video game, book and movie reviews. She lives in Manhattan. Nardio is her second of hopefully many (successful) web ventures. When she is not working as an executive assistant or at Nardio, Jasmine volunteers at Kitty Kind so that she can get her crazy cat lady on.